


Inlet

by anomieow



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha/Omega, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Collins’ Canonically Huge Dick, Getting Together, Knotting, M/M, Mind the Tags, Modern AU, Scent Kink, Scenting, Size Kink, Tenderness, This tag set deserves its own warning, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:53:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28083492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anomieow/pseuds/anomieow
Summary: Attempted non-con, not graphically portrayed.
Relationships: Harry D. S. Goodsir/Cornelius Hickey, Henry Collins/Harry D. S. Goodsir
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30





	Inlet

**Author's Note:**

> Attempted non-con, not graphically portrayed.

Henry Collins makes his way through the packed front room and elbows out a place for himself at the bar. People give him room—he’s 6’2” but seems taller, feels broader than he is. He orders a whiskey sour and surveys the crowd, mapping out with his nose what his eyes can’t decipher in the dim light. The crowd skews young and alpha, unsurprising for a Saturday night, but soon a lone figure attracts his attention. He’s in a corner booth in the back room, a pint at his wrist and a book open before him, as though this were a posh coffee shop. It’s dark back there but in the light that hangs low over the table he can make out a slop of curls, a slight build, the tilted glint of eyeglasses. It is curiosity that seizes Collins’ attention initially, for he seems extraordinarily out of place, but it is his hips, when he rises and walks slowly to the bar, that holds it. They are the sumptuously rounded hips of a born broodmare. Verging deliciously on excessive for his frame, he walks with a sway he can’t help, glancing about nervously as he makes his way down the short steps, threads the edge of the dance floor, and arrives at the bar. Collins’ fingers actually twitch in his pocket with an itch to grab his ass as he jostles in to stand at his elbow. He casts a friendly, curious glance at Collins through thick lashes, and god, he’s pretty. A sensitive and expressive face, thirty-something, with a softly full mouth. But before Collins can say anything, someone jostles him hard from behind, splashing his drink on his wrist.

He spins around with a growl, coming face to face with a guy whom he recognizes but couldn’t name. Dark hair, small mouth. He knows the type and they disgust him, horndog betas trotting along in the wake of alphas, sniffing for used-up omegas. But right behind him, grinning, stands Sol—the other half of the equation. He’s the one who uses those omegas up so Charlie—that’s his name, he recalls now—can have at them after. He wonders vaguely where Hickey, the third member and de facto leader of this shithead trio, is. Red hair, denim jacket, an ironic thrifted tee—once, kittens in a basket. 

“Hey, big man,” Sol says with a slap to Collins’ shoulder, “how’s it hanging?”

Collins stiffens, forces a smile. “Decent,” he says, “yourself?” He hates small talk but he’s learned the form and rhythm of it, recognizes its importance, especially for alphas, who might be at each other’s throat at the lightest provocation. 

“Good, good. Hot out today, yeah?”

“Sure was. Excuse me.” He turns away, but the man with the curls, the heavenly hips, has disappeared. 

Annoyed, though he’d no idea what to say anyway, he takes a small table next to the game room—a couple of pool tables, the wan flash of a few ancient pinball machines—and idly watches a young alpha teach his omega how to play pool for as long as it takes for him to finish his drink, then he wanders outside for a smoke. The heat still hangs in the midnight air, invisible but thick as broth, and with each drag of his cigarette he’s closer and closer to heading home. Sure, he’s got a rut coming on but the night feels all wrong—like there’s no doorway into the heart of it. But then the crowd at the far end of the lot heads inside and there, leaning against the graffitied wall, is the guy from earlier. And standing right up close to him, leaning into his space, is Hickey. In a jagged cresting of adrenaline, he feels the inarticulate rage his forebears must have felt at being denied. There was a time it would’ve been reasonable to scruff that rodent-faced pissant by the neck and snapped his spine. His blood rolls and sings at the thought and for a moment his muscles tense like he’s going to do it. He crushes out his cigarette with the heel of his boot and goes inside.

———

Goodsir would have preferred to spend the evening somewhere a little more sophisticated, or at the very least some place whose floor wasn’t covered in a gummy residue, some unholy admixture of spilled drinks and sweat, dried slick and accrued dust. He’d never considered himself fastidious but the very air here makes him feel unclean. Still, he tries to settle in. He’s vowed to at least try to get picked up, as absurd as the idea is to him. 

His boss, Stanley had called him into his office Friday afternoon. He’d gone to sit down but Stanley had stopped him, circling behind as his gaze dragged the length of his body. 

“What is this?” He’d asked, laying his palm on Goodsir’s hip.

“That’s a hip,” he’d answered softly. “Surely you know your anatomy better than that.”

“Very amusing,” he’d returned, not amused in the least. “These—well, I suppose _you’d_ call them trousers?” He shuffled incrementally closer, and Goodsir scented a faint drift of alpha arousal. “They are… exceedingly revealing.”

“I wouldn’t call them revealing, sir, though they have grown... admittedly snug these past months.”

Stanley trailed his fingertips over Goodsir’s hip and down the heavy curve of his buttock. He suppressed a shiver and slightly widened his stance, both allowing air to circulate through the dampened cleft of cloth between his thighs but also warning Stanley of the effect of his touch and proximity. Though bonded—faithfully—for some thirty years and the father of eight, Goodsir suspected he presented a specific temptation for the man, one which he was constantly striving not to acquiesce to. Stanley inhaled deeply and stepped back, his arms stiffly at his side.

“You do take suppressants, I presume.”

“Of course, how could I possibly—”

“And how old are you?”

“Thirty-five.”

“And need I explain to you, a lauded biochemist, that suppressants are not indefinitely effective?”

What followed was a lecture during which Stanley pointed out that Goodsir was by far the oldest omega employed there, that his continued presence would eventually become a kind of hazard if he was not able to better mask his semi-heats; he emphasized that one may only flout one’s biology so much, and that he could only guarantee employment and protection to such an extent. 

So here he is, attempting to present himself. His goals are twofold: to find a partner to ride out his coming heat, and to get good and drunk. For it will take the latter to ensure the former. It’s not that he is opposed to being bonded, or even knotted, but he has always looked for—how foolish it seems now, watching the young alphas and omegas in the crowd writhe and twist against each other as though it were simple—a certain sense of fate. As though he would see his alpha and say, _ah, there you are._ Even more humiliating is the fact that it is not even the omega in him that expects this but a certain romantic streak in his civilized self, an outdated belief in kismet that no amount of coaxing and lecturing can alter.

 _Well,_ he thinks to himself as he searches the crowd, _you are free of that, for tonight. Whether you like it or not._

His gaze lands, not for the first time tonight, on a tall, broadly-built alpha at the bar. Dark hair and heavy beard silver-streaked, thick and coarsely-sculpted arms and chest prominent beneath a tight black t-shirt. If ever a body alone could produce a sense of predestination—Goodsir flushes as he rises and walks slowly to the bar, aware of the alpha’s gaze heavy and longing on his hips the entire time. Flashes a gaze, orders another beer. And is stung when the alpha turns suddenly away from him. He tries to reason through it as he walks back to his booth with a fresh pint: perhaps he felt shy. Perhaps a friend spoke to him. There are many logical reasons for it, but before he’s talked through the sudden hurt he’s distracted by a voice at his side.

“I said, ‘how you doing tonight?’” This alpha is repeating. He’s a little one, maybe ten years Goodsir’s junior, with red hair hooked behind ears studded through with rings and studs. His eyes are intent, curious, warm. His smile is crooked, with prominent canines, and his nose seems just too large for his face, but the overall combination is one of unexpected—and therefore delightful—harmony. Besides, he smells delicious. Spicy, muddy. Makes him think of earth and burning wood, winter in the thick of a nauseating heat wave. He smiles back and is taken aback when he ducks his head into his curls and inhales. But what else is he here for? 

“Smell nice,” the alpha says. “I’m Neil—what’s your name?”

“I’m, uh, Harry.”

“Well, Harry, I’ve no slick lines to use on you—you’re such a lovely thing I’ll not risk it.”

“And _that_ line, Neil, does that ever work on anyone?”

He tilts his head; his grin lingers. “About fifty fifty, to be honest.” He slips his arm through Harry’s—he’s more entitled to Goodsir’s than he’d like and lacks altogether the delicious, solid feeling the man at the bar gave him. He looks over his shoulder and sees that one in conversation with another young alpha. So, all right. He walks with Neil’s arm in his, and it is nice to just be near someone warm. It has been a very long time. His last time, in fact, was with someone much younger, like Neil appears to be, though he was otherwise worlds apart. Tom, his name was, a worshipful and sweet thing in his first rut; he’d scented him out in a bar much like this one and could barely look him in the eye. Blond, skewing just the handsome side of average, with a crease between his brows as though perpetually vexed. They’d not had much to talk about, but the way he regarded Goodsir—as though he were a miraculous and impossible thing, a divine wonder—stayed with him. He’d begged Goodsir to bear his pups, to be his wife, but Goodsir had slipped away in the morning regardless. Neil, he intuits, will not be even a portion as reverential. Out here in the open air, at the back of the beer garden, he realizes how strong Neil’s scent is; he tastes a sourness to it. And in it he can smell things burning.

———

He’s gotten under his skin. If he’d at least said hello, at least gotten his name—well, if his taste runs toward sleek young flashy alphas, good riddance. That’s what Collins tries to tell himself, but he can’t shake the way he’d looked up at him. And his hindbrain’s still slavering over those hips, the contrast between the earthen curve of them and his delicate wrists, the fine sensitivity of his face. As Collins sits there in a table by the front entrance, idly running through the contact list on his phone, he finds himself feeling excited and warm. Is he happy or agitated? He can’t tell. He just knows his body remembers the other man, his fingers the itch to touch him, and it feels like… he shakes his head. He’s never believed in such things but it feels like something monumental has shifted in him.

 _Bullshit._ He feels near hysterical—surely, he can find a receptacle for his rut, though they’d be nothing more than that. Someone to stay for the night or the weekend, perhaps even paid to do so. If paid, he might at least feel less ashamed about preferring toys to the living thing, craving only the scent and taste of company while knotted into an over-sized flesh-textured toy. A humiliating irony it is, to possess in such excess the trait most desired by omegas that he cannot be accommodated by them. He considers: he doesn’t want anyone else, he wants _him_. Specifically, immensely. He leans back in seat, rubs his eyes. He’ll hold for another day. Go home, rub one out—he’s already imagining the taste of him, the oiled bilateral clasp of his slit around his tongue as he cries out, those hips filling Collins’ palms as he humps down into his open mouth, smothering him—maybe his vestigial dick, no doubt a pretty little rosy thing, would empty itself untouched— _dammit._ He should know better than to think himself into a knot six blocks and two subway rides from home.

Head ducked down, he traces the edge of the crowd, aware of the figure he must present—an alpha reeking of need, knot between his legs. He settles his tab with a series of monosyllabic grunts and tries to leave, but is waylaid near the door by a bold omega girl. She’s spilling out of her dress and onto him, and calls him daddy. He considers it for a second. But her scent’s masked by a saccharine vanilla blocker, so there’s nothing for him to hook into. He’s old-fashioned that way—he needs to scent his omega, know them on a primitive olfactory level. Let chemistry sing out to chemistry, sweat to sweat and breath to breath. He shakes her off as graciously as he can and slides outside. 

The air has finally begun to cool, but he’s still too warm. He begins the walk to his station, each landmark feeling to be an impossible distance from the one before. He tries to keep his mind clean as he walks: it won’t do to think of his hips, won’t do to wonder whether they’re exquisitely sensitive to the barest touch. Won’t do to imagine actually being able to knot inside of him, his slender back arched against the searing, sublime stretch of sheathing him to the root—the intricate architecture of his throat as his head lolls back on the pillow, won’t do to think of— _goddammit._ For a few fevered seconds he thinks he’s imagining the smell of the omega’s slick, so vivid are his unwilling thoughts, but no, he smells it for real.

He’s following that scent before he even asks himself if he should, turning down an alley. He hears hissed whispering, a whimper—and there, behind a heap of trash bags, he finds his omega beneath Hickey. It’s like an elbow to his gut—but then he realizes something is wrong. The omega is trying to turn onto his side, pedaling his feet and twisting his hips as he pushes at Hickey in an uncoordinated effort to get away. Hickey looks up at Collins, his eyes wide. Licks his lips once. In the moment it takes for him to regain his composure, the omega throws him to one side and scrabbles into a corner. Hickey’s on his knees, breathing hard and calculating his chances, before Collins makes the calculation for him—he grabs him by the back of his neck and drags him to his feet, and, gripping him by his scruff with one huge hand, curls the other into a fist and slams it into his gut. Once is enough. Hickey runs.

———

Goodsir had presented instinctively, rocking down onto his knees and elbows on the filthy concrete. It was the proper response, it seemed, not only to one alpha besting another but also to the appearance of this particular alpha period. But it is not the done thing, presenting in an alleyway, and is in fact regarded vulgar, brazen, obscene: things that Goodsir is not. He begins to rise to his feet but the alpha steps forward and stops him, lowering him down to kneel then sit. Mesmerized by the other man’s breadth and presence he lowers himself (with a faint grimace of disgust) onto the ground. And anyway, he’s bitterly disappointed, far more than he expected to be, by the alpha’s apparent disinterest in just—what? Mounting him like a dog? Goodsir laughs nervously at the thought, his cheeks coloring. 

The alpha kneels and thrusts his face into the hollow of Goodsir’s neck, snuffling. “Musk like cat piss,” he snarls. “Hickey’s, I mean.” 

“I’m sorry, I—”

“Shh,” he says, gently prying his knees apart. “Ok?”

Goodsir nods, swallows. _Anything,_ he almost says, but the last ragged vestige of propriety halts him. The alpha’s eyes are dilated near to black as he rocks down onto his belly and slides his bare arms beneath Goodsir, raising him up from the gritty chill of the ground. Then, to Goodsir’s astonishment, he lowers his face to the soaked cleft between his thighs, curls his hands down to grab his hips, and burrows in. He mouths at the rigid little hillock of his dick before nodding down to his slit, nestling his head side-to-side, snuffling noisily at his vulva through the cloth, sucks at the slick soaking it. Goodsir’s orgasm comes without warning, a hard thrash of heat in the floor of his body, and he has only a moment to be self-conscious before he feels himself open for it, a torrent of slick soaking Collins’ mouth and nose and chin. The alpha only shoves in closer—too rough, almost, in the tender trembling after, but Goodsir lets him; in pressing back he yields. 

The alpha sits up on his heels, beard glistening, and licks his lips, which are slightly parted to savor the scent and sapor of him. His eyes are still dark but the tension’s smoothed from his brow. Only then does he kiss him, ask his name, help him to his feet. 

———

It’s five blocks to Goodsir’s studio but it only takes two for Collins to fall irretrievably in love. The last three he spends catastrophizing, expecting Goodsir to casually mention, at any moment, his mate or his evangelical Christianity or his heroin habit, or for whatever illusion of attraction he has for Collins to abruptly dissipate—for Goodsir is a thing Collins is right certain he does not deserve. All brilliance, he is—soft and shining depths of intellect, with a warm openness of heart; yet there’s a trace too of something prim and sententious to him, a barbed touch to his sly wit that terrifies Collins. He fears rejection at any moment and is trembling by the time they reach his door. 

Goodsir’s studio is small and neatly cluttered. Collins has time to assess an entire wall of books, the feathered silhouette of ferns on a desk, an open futon, before Goodsir is rubbing his palm roughly against the now aching stiffness in his pants. Then, in elegant mimicry of what happened in the alley, Goodsir gentles Collins down onto the bed and scents him through his clothes. Collins luxuriates in how deeply the other man inhales the smell of him, even moaning faintly as he makes his way past his knot—which he must know better than to jostle—and buries his nose between his heavy stones with a soft moan.

Then he casts an inquiring glance at Collins and lays his hands on his fly. Collins nods. He’s always guilt-sick in this moment, as though he has been concealing a terrible secret. But he has also learned that trying to warn his partner yields more awkwardness than silence, so he inhales deeply and awaits judgment.

“Goodness,” Goodsir says faintly, working Collins compression briefs down to his knees. The air shifts incrementally—his arousal spikes, yes, but there’s a tart prickle of fear to it. 

“It’s too big,” Collins says, words tumbling out. “I know it is and I’m sorry for it, I don’t even try to knot inside anyone anymore, I—”

“You haven’t tried with me,” Goodsir replies softly. He wraps both hands around it, then runs his thumb up the fevered, leaden length of it. It twitches heavily in his hands. 

“Wait,” he says, abruptly rising to his feet. For a moment Collins is absurdly afraid he will send him away. But he simply pulls his t-shirt over his head and shimmies out of his jeans and stands naked before him for a moment. The sweet and raw smell of that lithe body reaches Collins in a wave and he clutches his aching knot.

Goodsir smiles shyly and climbs onto him, his slit spread over his shaft and his own little prick, thumb-sized and flushed, jutting prettily up above his own fist-width head. And he begins to move. God, he’s slippery and furnace-hot, and Collins can barely look away long enough to seek his face, mouth open in a panting _o_ and brow knit. With one hand Collins squeezes his knot as best he can and with the other maps those hips, that ass, his fingers and palms sliding across curves at once strong and giving. If it weren’t for the pulsing pain of his unsheltered knot, which is now so unbearable he’s nearly nauseous from it, he’d be—completely happy. Stupidly so. He grabs hold of his knot and squeezes as hard as he can, a shoddy approximation of omega cunt, and looks into Goodsir’s eyes with what he hopes is not a grimace.

“I’d like to try,” Goodsir says softly, and then, with surprising swiftness, he lifts up on his haunches and guides Collins about two-thirds of the way in at the first pass. Then he slows, winces. Collins can feel the muscles of his body clench around him; he feels his head pressed against solid flesh but then somehow more of it opens to him, embraces him. More of him. Goodsir is grimacing, tears glittering in his eyes, but he’s all right— _don’t stop,_ he’s saying, his words coming in sharp gasps, _I want all of you, I want your knot._ So Collins keeps pressing in. This is new country and it yields to him: estuary, inlet, fjord. His to map, to name. But in the end it’s Goodsir who, with a strained, high whine and a last decisive shove of his hips, pulls Collins’ knot into his body and, fixed there, undams it. 

He comes and comes in a great shuddering gush, feeling as he does Goodsir take it into his body. _God,_ he’s whimpering, _god, Henry, god,_ his knees clenched against his hips and his fingers digging into his chest as he rides out his own orgasm: Christ, it goes on and on, this warm wide rolling, until it tapers out and leaves them in a sweaty languor, collapsed into one another but still clenched together at the root.

“Would you stay?” Goodsir asks him softly after a time.

“As long as you’ll have me.”

“I mean—after this.”

“As long as you’ll have me.”


End file.
